The Hippodrome

(This is a continuation of a multi-part post. For part one, click here.)

Mississippi is a glorious state. If it wasn’t so hot (it was about 95 and humid today in Clarksdale), I’d love to live here for a while. We’ve been dressing fairly low profile and keeping the camera as discreet as possible, but even when they recognize we’re Northern tourists, people are still impeccably friendly and hospitable.

We left New Orleans last Thursday after a refreshing walk on the much hipper Frenchmen street, away from the girls (reluctantly) gone wild over on Bourbon. Local roads took us through the still much destroyed lower ninth ward, hit hardest by Katrina. We made our way up the gulf coast, hugging the shore as much as possible and eventually ending up in Gulfport.

There we visited an austere naval base where my grandfather was once stationed, and a b-b-q joint that was reduced to its foundations, blown away and abandoned. A picture on the wall of Daddy’s Little Kitchen, our replacement lunch locale, showed the building up to the roof in water. Even in the once affluent city of Biloxi, the only significant signs of industry were the massive casinos that rose like mountains off the man made beaches.

Depressed enough with the ravaging of Katrina, we skipped Mobile and headed instead to the sleepy town of Hattiesburg. We finally realized we had no idea what we were doing, and entered our second independent bookstore of the trip in search of a Mississippi guide. I managed to insinuate a “we’re from Boston” in the exchange with the cashier, and within twenty minutes, we had heard the life stories of the bookstore’s owners, the cashier (Diane) and her husband. We diligently wrote down every independent bookstore in Mississippi, and then borrowed Diane’s umbrella, enabling us to visit a local farmer’s market in the sunny rain.

At the market, I talked to a teen selling her photographs. She looked me square in the eye and explained that they “were an attempt to capture the essence of Mississippi.” Dropping another “we’re from Boston, sorry if we look lost” at a soap stand warranted a friendly “oh! I used to be stationed at Fort Devens!” and some friendly banter about the weather. Remarking on the weather is always a good idea.

A couple hours north, we hit the Elite Restaurant in Jackson, the state capital. The next morning at breakfast (which I slept through), my dad told me of a big family proudly reading off a U.S.A. Today every state Obama has won so far. Exploring the downtown in the morning showed another sleepy town, and in a downtown park parched by the heat, this church mural projected itself across the square… super southern Gothic:

West to Vicksburg brought us to the beautiful, 16 mile National Park that showed us the locales of one of the most important civil war battles. The conflicting inner narratives in the visitor’s center and tour were fascinating; the hokey 50s movie that we watched kept calling both sides “valiant” and “indisputably heroic.” My favorite of the 1300 statues was the Kansas memorial. The circles symbolize the union before, during, and after the war:

North to Greenville (via a national wild life refuge where I did indeed come within 20 feet of a wild alligator) created some inner disputes. Greenville was the poorest place I’ve ever visited… a waterfront casino has helped generate enough crime to board up most of the downtown, pushing commerce to the chains on the strip. Junior’s Juke Joint, an excellent delta blues resource, suggests several places in the neighborhood and urges people not to be afraid of the roving pimps and drug dealers that haunt the best places downtown.

We made a good faith effort to find some music, but nothing seemed to be going on. We ate at the now famous Doe’s Eat Place, sitting right in the kitchen between a man explaining to his son the ways the devil can get you, and a party of high school grads, arms tentatively around their girlfriends. A rove around town the next morning demystified some of the previous night’s uncertainties:

Now we’re in Clarksdale, soaking in the crossroads and visiting a few blues places tonight. The ways that music and culture influence eachother down here raise alot of interesting prompts, but that’s for a more detailed examination. I’m going try to take a video of Robert Belfour at Red’s Place tonight, and will have all the details in a few days… assuming an alligator doesn’t get me first.

This entry was posted by Ben Bernstein on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Written By Ben Bernstein. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.